Esther Lee

Hailing from the American South, Esther Lee lives and writes on a 35’ sailboat with her artist husband, Michael, and their cat, Bowie. A Kundiman fellow, she is the author of the chapbook, Blank Missives, (Trafficker Press) and her debut poetry collection, Spit, which received the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her writing and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in multiple literary magazines and anthologies.

Her second poetry collection, Sacrificial Metal, was selected as the winner of the Minds on Fire Book Prize by Conduit Books & Ephemera (Spring 2020). The poems in Sacrificial Metal offer a meditation through the lens of dance and human movement about the quiet dignities and alienation of illness, caregiving, and living in a racialized body. Part documentary poetics, part mourning diary, part textual choreography, and part nautical-inspired elegy, the poems serve as inquiries about how we may become socialized or exiled from a community, along with how movement and dance offer possibilities of interconnectedness with one’s own body and a sense of collective identity.